The BBC has published an article by Deborah Cohen on the NHS puberty blocker trial that is due to begin in 2025. In this article, Cohen quotes a member of conversion therapy activist parent organisation Bayswater Support Group as a neutral source.
The article is heavily weighted with those opposing trans healthcare for children and young people. It quotes WPATH, yet all of the other medical opinions are from those opposing the use of hormonal treatments. The section on parent opinions includes an academic whose research involves parents of young trans people, but no quotes from supportive parents themselves.
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Bayswater Support Group are a conversion therapy parent group operating under the guise of a support group for parents of trans children. The organisation's internal forums were exposed earlier this year which uncovered evidence of parents preventing their children from accessing Childline, mental health resources and rape crisis centres for fear of those services affirming their children's gender identity. Parents in the forum openly admitted to destroying or damaging their children's belongings, such as accessories and clothing, behaviour that constitutes domestic abuse. Bayswater support group still link to a DIY conversion therapy manual on their website.
Mentions British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
The words "killed" and "died" were more likely to be linked to Palestinian people. The study provided examples of sentences where both of those words were used, and found the BBC was more likely to link the active “killed” to Israeli deaths in that context.
Examples included:
"About 700 people have been killed in Israel since Hamas launched its attack on Saturday, with a further 500 having died in Gaza in retaliatory air strikes."
"Some 1200 people have been killed in Israel, while more than 1000 have died in retaliatory air strikes on Gaza."
"More than 700 people have been killed in Israel since Saturday and over 500 people have died in Gaza."Researchers said: "This work aims to shed light on bias in BBC reporting on Palestine in a way that is both transparent and reproducible."
Veteran TV executive Samir Shah, the co-author of Boris Johnson’s controversial race report, has been named the new chairman of the BBC.
The role was vacated by Richard Sharp in a cloud of controversy earlier this year, when the ex-Goldman Sachs banker quit after failing to declare his link to an ÂŁ800,000 loan made to Mr Johnson.
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The new chairman is best-known for his role co-authoring a much-criticised 2021 race report that dismissed the idea that Britain was institutionally racist.
Mr Shah strongly defended the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report – and claimed the response of the “race lobby” had failed to understand it.
He argued that “class, poverty, family circumstance and geography” played as big a role as race in life outcomes.
Mr Shah also said there was “no doubt” that racial disparity still existed – but insisted that racism was “not sweeping” and was “diminishing” in the UK today.
Commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the report found that institutional racism doesn’t exist. Some commissioners later claimed officials at No 10 helped rewrite the conclusion of the report.
The privileging of Israeli sources and perspectives is hardly new. An internal report by the BBC into its news coverage of Israel and Palestine that was commissioned by the corporation’s governors in 2006 remarked on “how little history or context is routinely offered”.
It also noted “the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and other lives under occupation”.
For evidence of this today, just consider the difference between the BBC’s “explainer” of what it calls the “Israel-Gaza war” whose chronology starts on 7 October 2023 and Al-Jazeera’s own version which argues that the current conflict “has its roots in a colonial act carried out more than a century ago”.
Most contracts these days also include all sorts of bits and bobs accounting for streaming, podcast content, and so on. In 1963, when the first episodes of Doctor Who aired, though, streaming was more likely to refer to a small river than anything blaring out of one of those new-fangled telly-boxes.
As a result (and we’re not lawyers), it looks like at least some of the rights – or at least a potentially valid claim to them – for the first few episodes of Doctor Who belongs to the estate of the original writer, Anthony Coburn. The BBC hasn’t admitted so much specifically, issuing the simple acknowledgement to the Radio Times. Just imagine the meetings that took place to get to that stage. There’s enough of a worry, clearly, to exclude An Unearthly Child from the line-up.
The contract Coburn signed in the 1960s won’t have given any provisions for reusing the show in a different context, certainly not this one, and their descendants – specifically in this case, Coburn’s son – are under no obligation to let the BBC do anything with the show other than broadcast on terrestrial TV.
Stef Coburn, the son in question, has been very active on his Twitter/X/whatever-it’s-called-this-week account.